Tag: Books

Guest post
by Marian D. Schwartz

The first week in January I received a brochure from an annual writers’ conference I attended over thirty years ago. Brochures from this conference have followed me from move to move, from the North to the South, and they have changed considerably since I first started receiving them. The staff fiction writers are no longer big “literary stars,” and the mention of editors and literary agents is done carefully, promising nothing other than their presence and some interaction with the people who are paying to attend.

The suggestion to enroll in the conference I had attended had come from a former professor, who had become my mentor. I had finished writing my first novel, Realities, less than two months before the conference was scheduled to start. I had also found an agent. By the end of my second day there, I had stopped taking notes at the lectures and had begun taking notes on what I was observing. I had never been in an atmosphere so intense, not even in graduate workshops I had audited when the professor/poets teaching them lost control of the discussion. Continue reading “The Writers’ Conference”